The Thing About Wildlife

This week I’m in conversation with the thoughtful and deeply grounded partnership of Devaki Nair and Manikandan R, part of the 2023 cohort of the Coexistence Fellowship.Manikandan, or Mani, is from Gudalur in Tamil Nadu, and brings with him a rich, lived understanding of the landscape—its people, histories, and more-than-human worlds. Having worked closely with local communities over the years, his knowledge is rooted in relationships, shaped by everyday engagements with forests, livelihoods, and shifting ecological realities.Devaki, on the other hand, is trained in the social sciences, with a keen interest in people-nature relationships and the ways in which knowledge, culture, and ecology intersect. Her work brings a reflective and analytical lens to the lived experiences of coexistence, grounding them in broader questions of conservation and community.Together, their work centres on the Paniya community in Gudalur, tracing how coexistence is practiced through everyday life—through mapping villages, documenting sacred spaces, and engaging with traditional livelihoods like basket weaving. Their project moved beyond conventional conservation narratives, drawing attention to the nuanced, often overlooked ways in which people and forests are entangled in relationships of care, memory, and mutual shaping.In this episode, they opened up a space to listen more closely to stories that challenge, complicate, and ultimately enrich our understanding of what it means to coexist.

This week I'm in conversation with the deep, strong and heartwarming partnership of Amir Chhetri and Priyanka Das, both part of the 2022 cohort of the Coexistence Fellowship.Amir hails from a forest village in northern West Bengal, and his indigenous knowledge on the biodiversity of the landscape and skills in community engagement are unparalleled. From a young age, Amir has worked with the Forest Department and as a safari guide for tourists, and later, has also worked with a range of research and conservation projects. On the other hand, Priyanka is trained in ecology and conservation science and has completed her M.Sc. from the Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History in Coimbatore. Besides working for various short-term projects in different capacities across India, she has been associated with their current project landscape since 2016. Together, they have worked on a series of projects for about a decade leading up to this Fellowship, and their is a partnership that inspires and keeps giving. Their present project addresses the underlying drivers of human-elephant negative interaction in northern West Bengal by providing technical assistance to the local forest department and monitoring ecological restoration in the degraded forest patches to ensure availability of forage species for elephants, unveiling further nuances of the coexistence world.Here it is now, The Thing About Old Bonds and Elephants with Priyanka and Amir from the Coexistence Fellowship.

This week I'm in conversation with the unlikely but effective partnership of Sunil Harsana and Nitesh Kaushik, both part of the 2022 cohort of the Coexistence Fellowship.Sunil is a homegrown conservationist from Mangar Bani who has spent over a decade of his life preserving the floral and faunal diversity in the (NCR)-Aravallis region, the last remaining natural forest of this landscape. He has also worked extensively to spread awareness among the Mangar Bani community and, during his work, has even unearthed evidence of a pre-historic civilisation in this area! He has a burning, deep focus with his work, where there has never been a distinction between the personal and professional - it is all just his life.Nitesh, complementarily, is a young and upcoming conservationist with big dreams who completed her Master's in Biodiversity and Conservation from Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, kickstarting her career by contributing to a baseline study of flora through ethnobotanical tools in the Damdama Biodiversity Park, in Haryana. Her main interests lie in understanding the relationship between humans and nature, which further found its footing through the Fellowship.Sunil and Nitesh are now working in the Aravallis of south Haryana, an important leopard corridor, between the Sariska Wildlife Sanctuary, in Rajasthan, and the Asola Bhatti Wildlife Sanctuary, in Delhi. Their project focused on understanding mammal diversity and their ecologies in this landscape, and enhancing human-leopard coexistence in the area. After some rocky beginnings, that you will hear more about in this episode, they are now thick as thieves and continue to collaborate towards common conservation goals in this landscape.Here it is now, The Thing About Finding Common Ground with Sunil and Nitesh from the Coexistence Fellowship.

This week I'm in conversation with the spirited Avantika Thapa. She was part of the first cohort of the Coexistence Fellowship, and went through the programme with her partner, Chandra Maya Sharma. Avantika hails from the hills of Darjeeling and has been knowingly and unknowingly linked with nature from a young age. Serendipity and more kind humans along the way helped her find her footing, and she then went on to pursue a PhD and this Fellowship to better study the people and wildlife of the eastern himalayas. Both she and Chandra Maya noted the disparity between the stories they grew up hearing and the realities they now lived among. Avantika is an enthusiastic do-er, and has since not let go of any opportunities to give back to the communities she works with. She has used her voice well in these years and is now a post doctoral consultant with ATREE, based out of Gangtok in Sikkim. Hers is truly an inspiring and motivating story, and I hope like me, you feel a bubbling burning urge to do your bit to make a difference in this world after listening to this episode.The Coexistence Fellowship thanks the University of Trans-Disciplinary Health Sciences and Technology (TDU) for creating a home for the Coexistence Fellowship Programme, and the British Asian Trust and Elephant Family for their generous support, also to the Coexistence Consortium for their guidance as their knowledge partner.

Dive into a thought-provoking conversation with one of the Coexistence Fellowship pairs - Mahesha & Vinay - in our very first episode of Season 6, where we discuss the importance of viewing the world through multiple ways of knowing, redefine what we mean by 'science' and look closer at community-held knowledge and indigenous practices in wildlife management and conservation!This season, we are in conversation with the Coexistence Fellowship - a transformative programme that empowers pairs of fellows, including local community members, to collaboratively develop culturally grounded, equitable conservation practices focused on human-wildlife coexistence across India. It aims to shift conservation paradigms by centering community knowledge, fostering mutual learning, and building a movement of conservation practitioners rooted in empathy, reciprocity, and shared stewardship. The Coexistence Fellowship thanks the University of Trans-Disciplinary Health Sciences and Technology (TDU) for creating a home for the Coexistence Fellowship Programme, and the British Asian Trust and Elephant Family for their generous support, also to the Coexistence Consortium for their guidance as their knowledge partner.

Today we bring you you an enthu-cutlet conversation with the excitable and passionate Sayee Girdhari. With important nudges from the universe towards the world of botany through happy coincidences and crucial mentors, Sayee fell deeply in love with trees. After spending some pivotal time working with the Karnataka state biodiversity board and Terracon Ecotech exploring the plant world across a range of habitats, she now finds herself being the flag holder and spokesperson for the citizen science platform, SeasonWatch. She is a Project Coordinator under the Education and Public Engagement programme at the Nature Conservation Foundation, and is the undisputed queen of the tree walk, most prolifically in Maharashtra. I hope this episode moves you to peer into the souls of some of your neighbourhood trees, and perhaps towards being a botanical citizen scientist too!

Today I bring you you a warm and wholesome conversation with the incomparable Nitya Satheesh. She's had a fascinating journey within the wildlife space and has contributed to a slew of disciplines within the field, but most notably in the environmental education sector. We recorded this episode a while ago while she was a Senior Program Manager at the Centre for Wildlife Studies for several years, primarily working on every aspect of their flagship Wild Shaale conservation education program. She is now the Head of Engagement at the Echo Network that brings nuanced science to a vast range of audiences and collaborators to tackle real-world problems in human and environmental spaces. Nitya has been a mentor, a friend, a colleague and confidante ever since I started my first proper job in this field, and this episode was my selfish way to reconnecting with a beautiful soul who I've dearly missed - I hope you learn from her as I have in all these years!

Today's episode features the wonderful Shweta Shivakumar with whom we continued on our Season 5 journey hitting upon our recurring themes of coexistence and living alongside wildlife. Shweta worked on a fantastic PhD at the Centre for Wildlife Studies that focused on attacks by big cats on people. The case study of Shweta's work delved into the spatiotemporal patterns of leopard attacks on people and narratives of these attacks in Himachal Pradesh. She is now a Programme Manager with the High Altitudes Programme at the Nature Conservation Foundation to continue doing such meaningful work! Our conversation meandered through empathy, loss, nostalgia and laughter.

Today, I'm in conversation with India's foremost historian, Dr Ramachandra Guha: an environmentalist, prolific writer and public intellectual whose research interests include social, political, contemporary, environmental history, and is an important authority on the history of modern India. Many of you may know him through his writings, like Environmentalism, that I first had the pleasure of reading for a university assignment several years ago, India after Gandhi, The Unquiet Woods, Makers of Modern India and Savaging the Civilized. Dr Guha is now out with his most recent book - with poingnantly writing that you'd want to relish while hanging onto the important historical and philosophical insights it provides. It's called Speaking with Nature - a comprehensive volume that walks us through the most important personalities in India's global history of environmentalism, highlighting the immense diversity of thought, practice and environmental literacy that our country has always housed.

This is the first of two episodes recorded in the Eaglenest Wildlife Sanctuary, Arunachal Pradesh, with the fantastic field staff that works with Dr Umesh Srinivasan. This episode features two young women who joined the team three years ago - Dema and Aiti (Kanchi) - who have since become invaluable members of the research teams that conduct bird research in this mountainous landscape!